You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Chapter IV, p. 448. - Adam Smith, Book 3, The Wealth of Nations

whether or not you credit psychoanalysis itself, the fact remains that we all must, to the greatest extent possible, understand one another's minds as our own; the very survival of humanity has always depended on it. - Open Culture

In the wiki its a big daft motor cycle helmet and I wonder what that's about because in the documentary footage and a book I read about this it was instead like a swimming cap or neurological scan head piece, I've always wondered about means to altered states of consciousness as it pertains to spirituality, like when I've read about someone who has a vision at the end of a physical trial or meditation of some sort, especially since I know that I'm unlikely to be able to reproduce the same results myself. I'm less enamoured with the idea of toxicological short cuts to expanded consciousness or altered states, perhaps because I associate them with damage or risk which I dont associate something like the God helmet idea with.

Yeah and for what it's worth, apart from some shamanistic practices where there is centuries of knowledge and sturdy tradition behind the use of plants to induce altered states of consciousness (like illustrated in this article http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ad...ures/peru.html about ayahuasca ) I think all those five penny teen drug abusers who think this or that substance is a shortcut to enlightenment are in some very real danger. I know of someone personally who ended up in a psychosis for 4 years after being enamored with Timothy Leary and some strange experiences they had under substances. If it were a shortcut to anything we'd have a whole bunch of enlightened college kids running around, but no.
Personally I'm kind of with the Zen buddhists on the whole subject of altered states... more like just practicing oneness and letting the dominoes fall, or not fall for that matter.

Don’t contribute to reward oriented thinking and don’t contribute to ego-centric thinking. In other words, don’t let behavior betray belief. Live as much as possible as if all is One. If you see yourself as a separate person, you will see lots of separate people, but if you see all as just a part of you (or everything as just an expression of the Universal Oneness) then that dramatically changes the scenery. Don’t emphasize the ego or chase results, instead just reside as a detached witness, silently watching everything play itself out. At the end everything will take its natural place. The person that you think you are will go about his or her life spontaneously and the Oneness will be where your awareness is established – that is true zazen.http://anmolmehta.com/blog/2007/03/0...azen-practice/